Friday, November 02, 2012

Hobby Lobby: Fighting For Life and Religious Freedom Against ObamaCare

Over at NRO's The Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Kyle Duncan, an attorney with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty who is representing Hobby Lobby CEOs, David and Barbara Green, in the company's lawsuit against the religious bigotry of ObamaCare.Evangelicals, the Greens are opposed to the abortion-inducing drugs included in [the ObamaCare insurance] mandate, joined with Catholics and other people of faith in business, religious institutions, and faith-based social-service organizations (including schools, hospices, hospitals) who have gone to court in recent months in response to the coercive mandate…

Barack Obama’s Department of Justice argues, that religious-liberty rights to not extend to…businessmen. Recall that this is an administration whose posture toward religious liberty was slapped down unanimously earlier this year in the Hosanna-Tabor case involving a Lutheran religious school. And yet the administration continues to work to erode religious liberty…

The Greens do not have a religious objection to contraceptives in general. But they do object to “emergency contraceptives” like the “morning after pill” (Plan B) and the “week after pill” (ella) because those drugs — as the FDA’s own birth control guide explains — can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg in the womb. For the Greens, like many Christians, that amounts to a chemical abortion. They cannot in good conscience offer those drugs in their health plan because they believe it implicates them in abortion. But the Health and Human Services mandate forces them to cover those drugs for free. If they refuse, they risk fines of about $1.3 million per day. This is an intolerable position, and so the Greens felt they had no other option than filing a lawsuit…

Hobby Lobby is not the first business to sue over the HHS mandate, but it is the largest. When a company this prominent feels compelled to sue its own government, something significant has happened. The lawsuit raises important questions about whether government can force religious believers to give up their faith as a cost of doing business…

The administration’s arguments in this case are shocking. Here’s what they are saying: once someone starts a “secular” business, he categorically loses any right to run that business in accordance with his conscience. The business owner simply leaves her First Amendment rights at home when she goes to work at the business she built…

The administration’s position here — while astonishing — is actually consistent with its overall view of the place of religion in civil society. After all, this is the administration who argued in the Hosanna-Tabor case last year in the Supreme Court that the religion clauses of the First Amendment offered no special protection to a church’s right to choose its ministers — a position that the Court rejected 9-0. This is the administration which has taken to referring to “freedom of worship” instead of “freedom of religion” — suggesting that religious freedom consists in being free to engage in private rituals and prayers, but not in carrying your religious convictions into public life. And this is the administration who crafted a “religious employer” exemption to the HHS mandate so narrow that a Catholic charity does not qualify for conscience protection if it serves non-Catholic poor people.

As you point out, the administration is trying to justify its rigid stance against religious business owners by saying otherwise they would become a “law unto themselves,” and be able to do all sorts of nasty things to their employees — like force them to attend Bible studies, or fire them if they denied the divinity of Christ. Nonsense. Hobby Lobby isn’t arguing for the right to impose the Greens’ religion on employees, nor for the right to fire employees of different religions. There’s already a federal law that protects employees from religious discrimination and that’s a very good thing. This case is about something entirely different: it’s about stopping the government from coercing religious business owners. The government wants to fine the Greens if they do not violate their own faith by handing out free abortion drugs, and now it’s saying they don’t even have the right to complain in court about it...